Xenophobia and Resignation in the Wake of the Mongol Conquest: Topical Allusions in Gong Kai’s Zhong Kui Scroll

Drawing on Zhong Kui’s legendary identity as a demon queller, this study suggests that Gong Kai (1222–1307) created a veiled autobiographical work, Zhongshan Going on Excursion in the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC, that combines painting and inscription to project his unfulfilled aspiration to clear the nation of destructive evils. The demons to be expelled in his life as a Song patriot living into the Mongol Yuan were the powerful and abusive ethnic others, not limited to the ruling Mongols. Conflating himself with Zhong Kui by constructing a new, self-referential biography and image of the demon queller, Gong Kai conveyed his xenophobia during the dynastic transition through two topical allusions, the Muslim merchant-official Pu Shougeng’s fatal blow to the Song revivalist cause in Quanzhou in late 1276 and the Tibetan Buddhist leader Yang Lianzhenjia’s desecration of Song imperial tombs in Shaoxing in 1285. In the painting, Gong Kai confesses his resignation to the brutal new realities under alien rule by portraying Zhong Kui in an uncharacteristically subdued demeanor.